We're doing better here every day. The weather has been sublime--70's all week. Cooler today, but improving. I love it. I love the spring.
Owen and Dad have been planting in the yard. They've created a vegetable garden and added new flowers and shrubs to the landscape. The bulbs they planted last fall are coming up.
Owen really gets into the gardening. She gets right in there and digs. This day she loved helping Grandpa clear a patch for the strawberry plants.
The dog in the photo, above, is not ours. He belongs to our neighbor across the creek and road. He visits regularly, especially whenever we're in the yard. And, when the neighbors go out of town, he just saunters on over and stays the nights on our porch. He's a very social pup.
Which reminds me...I never did update you guys on what happened to our hounds (the ones I wrote about here). It's not much of a story, but while I was in the hospital with Barrett, my Dad came home to feed them. A man was in the driveway, with Daisy in his pickup truck bed. He was trying to coax a reluctant Homer off our porch. The man didn't want to go up on our porch and Homer didn't want to leave his adopted home. The man told Dad they were his. He seemed to know the dogs and his description of where he lived (over the mountain behind us and into the next valley) made sense for how the dogs got to us. After talking to him a bit, Dad let him take them. He was a hunter, had those cages in the back you see often around here. They probably went home to individual pens and a dog houses made from tipped-over five-gallon barrels. I wonder if they think of those nice people who let them sleep on their porch in a Dogloo, fed them twice a day, let them roam freely, and scratched them behind the ears sometimes. It's for the best. I had enough on my plate. But I miss them sometimes. They were nice dogs. A pain in the ass, but sweet nonetheless.
Barrett is doing well, gaining weight like a champ. She's fussier than Owen was, it seems, and she does NOT like to sleep in a crib. She sleeps either: on the chest of an adult, in someone's arms, in the car seat, or in the bouncy seat. That's it. So we have to hold her a lot. Sometimes all day long. All day and night.
However, we did get to go to a movie last night. Shooter, which was your typical shoot 'em up, bad guy gets it in the end movie, but who cares? I got to go to a place with adults only and sit next to my husband and hold his hand. Thank you, Mom!
Owen's behavior is improving. Schedules and routine helps. It's a hard time for her. New sister, new routines, plus she'll be three next month, which means more is expected of her--more maturity, more independence, but also more responsibility. She bounces between "I can do it, I'm big," and "I'm too little, I can't," with such speed it makes your head spin.
Plus she has all these adults talking talking talking at her. Dad, Mom, Grandma here most of the week, Grandpa here several days a week. One day the daycare sent home a note that she had bitten another child (it was a preprinted form--The Bite Form--so must happen often). Poor child ended up having to talk about it three times. Mom, who picked her up from school and received the form, talked to her about it in the car. I talked to her about it when she got home and Mom gave me the form. And then when Paul got home from work, her talked to her about it. I kind of feel for her.
And yet...it just infuriates me when she pitches these fits about the simplest things I ask her to do. Stuff we do every day: baths, dinner, getting dressed for school. Intellectually, I can look back and see that "Yes, it's a hard time for her." I can even intellectualize the need for standing my ground and insisting she follow the rules. But when she's screaming and struggling for the fourth day in a row about sitting at the table with the rest of us to eat dinner, I just want to pull my hair out.
Welcome to parenthood, eh? Sometimes it's, quite simply, a bitch. Other times, well, nothing beats it.
Gotta run--Barrett is screaming for my attention.